Articles in Category: Nora Updates

​With the deepest sympathy and remorse, we mourn today for the passing of Gwendolyn Strong. She was seven years and nine months old and had type-1 SMA. "G" (as we called her) passed away last Saturday morning peacefully at home with her family. Gwendolyn was a true SMA hero, ​and something about her, her story, and her family captivated the hearts of so many...
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It's been a tradition for us to celebrate Nora's half birthday. It's actually July 23rd but we had a conflict, so we celebrated a week early.

We asked Nora what she'd like for the days events and she said the following: Mommy and Daddy day (what she calls it when we're both home), Disney Store, Build-a-Bear, and the Splash Pad (Knoxville Zoo water park). We accepted her terms, and also squeezed time to see the...

Since we had an extra day to play with Nora due to the holiday, we gave her something we'd held over from Christmas. Disney Infinity 2.0! We had played the earlier 1.0 version a long time ago. I didn't think Nora would remember, but she did. She saw one of the characters that goes with the old game and Nora said "That's a baby game"."It wasn't for babies Nora, it was just tha-"
"I played it wheni> I was a baby".
"you actually remember that?"
"uh huh"

Nora was now the correct age for the game and loves playing it. Jaime even plays the game too which is the coolest thing...

Jaime's mother and brother drove down from Wisconsin for a visit. On their previous visits we did some extreme activities like Zip Lining and renting a pontoon boat. This trip we kept rather low-key compared to the previous visits.
Nora was just thrilled to have them in the house...

Nora had to have this new character from the movie Inside Out (coming to theatres mid-June) called Bing Bong. It's a character she first descibed as "creepy" when first seeing him at the local Disney Store. He's like a strange hobo which is part ?something? and part elephant. She wanted nothing to do with the creepy elephant, but Jaime bought her the Tsum Tsum anyway because she [Nora, I think] collects them.

Nora Gooden graduated kindergarten today from her kitchen table. She has attended school via Skype every day for the entire school year. Each morning before chest therapy her iPad rings, having been called from a computer setup in the classroom. "It's truly the coolest thing ever" said her father when asked about the graduation milestone "really never thought we'd....

Proving yet again, you truly can buy anything on the internet, Jaime bought some butterfly larva. They came looking similar to seeds suspended in brown goo. The next day they began to move and eat. Two days later, and there were nicely sized caterpillars chomping up all the brown goo. Nora became interested then. The next week they had suspended themselves and began forming their chrysalis.

Jaime moved them to the green butterfly cage you see in the images. A week went by then suddenly...

Nora has this new thing she does in the evening. I think it started when off-handedly, one of us said "say goodbye to Mr. Sun" as the sun was setting. Nora got upset then too if I remember right... but now she...

Welcome to the new goodentree.com. I'm still fixing some things around here so you could bump into a few errors. There are 8 Nora updates, I will be publishing over the next 2-3 days as I get everything stable, so keep checking back often!

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Tomorrow is the day! Nora will receive her first injection of Spinraza. We are all a little terrified of what... fb.me/3dUSg9ZeK

Written on Thursday, 11 May 2017

goodentree /ˈgo͝odənˌtrēˈ/ noun

derived from our last name: Gooden and the idea of a family tree We came up with the name after we made the decision to start a family (have a child). When Nora was born and diagnosed with the terminal disease SMA, her story quickly spread, and goodentree became established.